There is an ever increasing demand for faster and more robust broadband data transmissions within the field of wireless networks. The radio frequency resources that can be used are however limited. In order to provide an efficient use of the resources, and some degree of fairness between the wireless devices served by the network, some network utilize procedures of reservation and scheduling of radio transmissions. In these procedures wireless devices within the network negotiates about existing resources and they are allowed to reserve resources for future transmissions. It is beneficial to the data-throughput in the network if wireless devices are provided with communication scheduling that can ascertain that the communications, i.e. the sending and receiving of data, are appropriately planned in order to at least reduce the number of re-transmissions. Having to retransmit messages and data depletes the system resources and will negatively affect the system through-put.
To be able to further increase the data throughputs in general networks mechanisms that can improve the reservation and scheduling procedure are of significant value.
A particular way to respond to the increasing demand for mobile broadband, MBB, data has also resulted in proposals of using new spectrum bands for transmission. New radio access technologies, RATs, are currently being investigated and developed for operating in higher frequency bands, i.e., in frequency bands above 6 GHz. In particular RATs designed to operate somewhere in the range 10-60 GHz are being developed. This frequency band is commonly referred to as the millimeter wave band, mmW band. The higher frequency bands impose new requirements on the RAT stemming from the radio propagation characteristics of the bands. Higher frequencies require high gain beamforming and imply higher path and penetration losses than experienced at lower frequencies, e.g., around 2 GHz. Hence there is also a need for finding mechanisms that can at least counter losses like these and act to improve the data throughput for networks susceptible to such losses.
There is therefore a general demand to at least provide improvements for handling of radio resource in order to increase the data-throughput in a network.